With just under 15 days to go before the city of Peoria's ban targeting homeless encampments on public property goes into effect, Community Development Director Joe Dulin says it’s difficult to define just how ready the city is to enforce it.
The department plans to focus its initial efforts on the highly visible encampments along the downtown Interstate 74 corridor.
“We’re not going to go out hunting for additional ones until we work on those,” said Dulin.
These are the sites that several downtown business owners say make the central business district less safe and negatively impact their livelihoods.
Right now, Dulin says the main focus is sheltering as many of the people living alongside the interstate as possible before enforcement starts. Organizations like the Home for All Continuum of Care and LULA Peoria work closely alongside the department on this effort.
“Our main focus the last few weeks have been working with them, on continuing to work on them until the 30 days is into effect,” said Dulin. “So, you know, the more people that we can get housed and off the streets, the less people this ordinance will impact.”
Dulin does not have a number on how many people from the encampments have already been housed, but he stresses that ordinance enforcement will not be a “quick overnight thing." It will be the beginning of a process.
“There’s a multitude of people out there and with staff, you know, we’re going to be systematically going from location to location and seeing what we can do,” said Dulin. “So yes, that’s when the effect goes into place. That’s when we’ll start the process. But, it won’t be something like…on [December] 19th encampments will just be cleared, or anything like that.”
Though discussion during last month’s city council meeting clearly showed local nonprofits don’t support the ordinance, Dulin said they still play an important role.
“If you look at the process as we defined it to the council, we let [the nonprofits] know when we’re going out to enforce it,” he said. “We make sure that they’re available. We make sure to connect people that we are enforcing the ordinance with to the nonprofit partners.”
The process Dulin refers to plays out over five to six days.
On day one, city staff tell the unhoused person they’re in violation of the ordinance and need to vacate. Employees also notify local nonprofits and give the person a list of contact information.
City staff return two days later. If the person is still there, they give them a two-day warning and attempt to get them to “move along” again.
Citations, fees and eventually incarceration become possible if the person remains after repeated warnings over several days. This is also where the police department would get involved. Fines escalate from $50 to $750, depending on how many violations of the ordinance have occurred within 180 days of the original notice. After a third violation, the homeless person could face jail time up to six months.
Dulin said he expects incarceration and fines to occur very rarely. The point, he says, isn’t punishment, but to encourage people to move in a manner similar to strategies already in use for those camping on private property.
“The ordinance is really designed for us to clear the area and to make the public space available, back to the public again,” Dulin said. “So we can still use this process to clear it and then go from there.”
There may be situations where personal belongings are left behind or confiscated. Dulin says those objects will be held by the Community Development department for at least 30 days, possibly more if the owner is working with social service organizations that notify the department.
Dulin said they can then contact community development to retrieve their belongings.
“When we’re out there, the social service providers usually know who it belongs to, or if they’re there and help us pack it up,” Dulin said. “You know, sometimes when people are moving on, if they’re going to a shelter or stuff, they have more stuff they can’t take, so they might be wanting us to store some of it for them, while they’re looking for more permanent housing.”
The Community Development Department is shouldering the vast majority of the work required to enforce this ordinance. Dulin said that determination is based on how similar ordinances function in other municipalities.
“In Peoria, our police have a lot on their hands that they’re dealing with,” he said. “And we don’t want it to just start as kind of an enforcement issue. We want it to start as an issue of ‘we’re trying to help.’”
Dulin said the Community Development Department has established relationships with Peoria’s homeless residents through various housing assistance programs already. He said that gives his staff a greater chance of finding a way to get them housed before the more punitive approach outlined in the city ordinance is activated.
Several other Central Illinois communities are also passing or clarifying their own versions of encampment bans in the wake of last summer's Grant's Pass decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, including Pekin, Morton, East Peoria, and Delavan.
